The risk of contracting diseases such as HIV or hepatitis from accidental sticks with dirty needles is a potentially deadly hazard for medical professionals. Although many syringe designs have been created to avoid or minimize the risk of dirty needle sticks, few if any of these designs have been directed to syringes for collecting aspirated matter.
There are more than fifty diseases in which fine needle aspirations or biopsies are used in the diagnostic process to collect body fluids and matter suspended in body fluids. Some of these aspirations involve detection of a carcinoma, such as with suspected breast or prostate cancer. In detecting carcinomas, fine needles of 25 to 30-gauge are used in order to reduce the risk of needle tracking, which occurs when cancerous cells contained in a lesion track the needle path upon withdrawal, thereby possibly creating an artificial metastasis. Sheaths, which protect the operator from inadvertent self puncture with contaminated needles in intramuscular injection and other sharps procedures, cannot be used to detect carcinomas because they result in an increased diameter of the needle path, thereby facilitating needle tracking.
Needle aspirations are typically performed by physicians. However, because most needle puncture procedures are performed by nurses, practically all research and development of sharps safety procedures have been directed toward these procedures, leaving the needle biopsy physician unprotected. The problems associated with needle tracking, and the comparatively small number of fine needle aspirations, has resulted in little or no improvement in safety factors related to needle biopsy procedures. While relatively small in number in comparison to the other sharps procedures combined, millions of needle biopsy procedures are performed every year. Consequently, there is a very real need for needle aspiration safety syringes for avoiding dirty needle sticks. Accordingly, a safety syringe that meets the following objectives is disclosed.